Racial Conflicts and Violence in the Labor Market

Roots in the 1919 Steel Strike

Cliff Brown

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780815331766
• eBook ISBN: 9781317776505
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book focuses on community-level race relations during the 1919 Steel Strike, when intense job competition contributed to racial conflict among the nation's steel workers. As the Great Migration brought thousands of black workers to northern cities, their lower labor costs generated racially split labor markets in the industrial sector. Further, the discriminatory policies of labor unions forced many blacks to serve as strike breakers during periods of class conflict. As a result, the migration heightened racial conflict and undercut important union organizing initiatives. The 1919 Steel Strike illustrates how racial divisions crippled many American unions, a pattern that helps to explain the demise of organized labor during the 1920's. No previous studies of the 1919 Steel Strike have systematically compared community processes to determine how local events shaped the strike's outcome. Despite the failure of the 1919 Steel Strike, the varied experiences of workers in different communities reveal much about the causes of racial conflict and the possibilities of interracial solidarity. This study finds that patterns of black migration, local government repression of labor, the organizational strength of local unions, and employers' efforts to inflame racial tension all help to explain community-level variation in interracial solidarity and conflict. (Ph. D. dissertation, Emory University, 1996; revised with new preface)

Chapter 1

Introduction: Labor, Race, and Class Conflict in 1919

During World War I, thousands of black workers moved into the urban and industrial centers of the North. This marked the beginning of a massive exodus from the southern states that later became known as the Great Migration. The Great Migration was critical for the labor movement, and ultimately, for the future of American race relations. Discrimination and competition in the workplace contributed significantly to racial conflict, which intensified during a wave of union organizing drives and strikes between 1917 and 1921. As the proportion of black workers increased in the nation’s industrial sector, strikebreaking and racial violence compromised union organizing efforts. At times, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) adopted racially inclusive rhetoric. However, the AFL took few concrete steps to incorporate African Americans into the labor movement and the discriminatory practices of many AFL unions continued long after World War I.

I argue that the development of split labor markets helps to explain the heightened racial conflict of this era. As defined by Edna Bonacich, split labor markets are characterized by a racial divergence in the labor costs of comparably skilled workers.¹ A split labor market often results when minority workers migrate from an economically underdeveloped region to take advantage of political or economic opportunities elsewhere. For instance, African Americans fleeing the South’s sharecropping economy benefited from higher industrial wages in the North and escaped the oppressive Jim Crow racial caste system. Once the Great Migration was underway, many unions attempted to minimize job competition and preserve racial privileges by excluding black workers. Few of the financially desperate migrants could afford to participate in strikes or alienate employers by affiliating with the labor movement. The combined pressures of union discrimination and economic need encouraged many African Americans to become strikebreakers. These dynamics were evident in the steel industry as well as in other sectors of the northern industrial economy.²

The steel strike of 1919 was a critical juncture in American history that brings the importance of working-class race relations into sharp relief. First, the black migration completely changed the demographics of the steel towns in the three years preceding the strike. African Americans were a tiny minority of the nation’s steelworkers in early 1916, but by the end of 1918 had increased to one-tenth or even one-fifth of the total in many communities.³ Neither employers nor the AFL had secured the black migrants’ allegiance, a situation that racially charged strikes and union organizing efforts. Second, racial tensions were clearly mounting. In 1919, race riots swept the country and there was a dramatic increase in black strikebreaking.⁴ Third, technology and mechanization undermined the importance of workers’ skills in steel production. The drive for rationalization and efficiency undercut the position of the nation’s industrial craft workers, jeopardized their labor organizations, and increased racial job competition.⁵ Finally, the entire labor movement experienced a massive surge. In 1919, over four million workers went on strike, more than twice the number in any prior year. David Brody suggests that the future of organized labor hinged on the outcome of the 1919 steel strike: “if unionism entrenched itself, the entire mass-production sector could be swept into the labor fold.”⁶

For a variety of reasons, the strike ended in defeat for the workers. Because the strike was pivotal for the labor movement and because racial divisions emerged as a significant weakness, the implications of this study extend beyond the northern steel-producing communities that are the focus of this book. Workers in the coal, meatpacking, and automobile industries also confronted rapidly changing labor market conditions that increased the salience of racial conflicts. Despite industry-specific characteristics, such as the organization of work, the nature of workers’ skills, the effects of technology, and unions’ membership policies, the Great Migration challenged the class basis of union solidarity in the nation’s most important industries.

Had the AFL been able to forge strong interracial coalitions in the mass production sector of the economy, American unionization and race relations might have followed significantly different trajectories. However, during the 1920s, many black workers rejected unionism and responded instead to the paternalistic overtures of employers. The labor movement was clearly in decline and unions continued to discriminate in practice if not in policy. Patterns of racial segregation in America’s cities, evident but not yet pervasive in 1919, became deeply institutionalized in subsequent decades.⁷ In this sense, the 1919 steel strike bears witness to the historical significance of working-class racial conflict and its crippling effects on organized labor. It also symbolizes the interplay between workplace relations and racial inequality: union racism denied black workers the opportunities for upward mobility that benefited many members of white immigrant groups.

This is not to overstate the centrality of race for understanding the dynamics of this particular strike or the post-World War I era generally. Racial conflict was not the only or even the most important cause of the strike’s failure, nor does it sufficiently account for labor’s weakness during the 1920s. However, working-class race relations became more divisive and had a greater impact on the efficacy of labor organizing in the wake of the Great Migration. The racial conflicts that characterized 1919 are indicative of a fundamental shift in the structure of industrial labor markets. This transformation challenged the nation’s labor movement and initiated a new period in American race relations.

To a degree, split labor markets became self-sustaining. Union discrimination kept black workers outside of the labor movement and insured that African Americans’ labor costs would be lower. African Americans’ non-union status encouraged black strikebreaking, which reinforced union discrimination and led to a vicious cycle of conflict. The split labor market dynamics that emerged in 1919 affected the strategies of black and white workers, union leadership, and employers in subsequent labor organizing drives.⁸ By the early 1930s, the divisive effects of split labor markets had begun to subside, creating new opportunities for solidarity in the nation’s labor unions. The Depression eliminated many of the economic incentives for migration and facilitated a rising tide of industrial unionism. By the middle of the decade, the interracial organizing strategies of the Congress of Industrial Organizations helped to undercut race-based differences in labor costs and heralded a new era for the labor movement. Before the 1930s, however, relatively few unions adopted the purposeful interracial strategies necessary to achieve working-class unity.⁹

The “Whiteness” of the American Labor Movement

The split labor market perspective focuses analyses of racial conflict on the working class. According to the theory, employers do not actively incite or manipulate racial antagonism. Instead, they support open market competition, which displaces higher-cost workers and may threaten union solidarity. In contrast, many Marxist arguments dismiss or downplay working-class racism by attributing it to employers’ successful use of divide-and-conquer tactics.¹⁰ Bonacich notes that many Marxist formulations explain a phenomenon by showing that it serves the interests of capital. This “Marxist functionalism” is highly problematic; merely showing that a situation benefits capitalists does not prove that capitalists brought it about.¹¹ Such Marxist scholarship has obscured the active role of working-class individuals and groups in generating and sustaining racial ideologies. In contrast, split labor market theory accords with more recent literature that has located the sources of racism and racial conflict in the working class.

David Roediger has suggested that as capitalist industrialization degraded work and leveled workers’ skills in the nineteenth century, the development of a working-class identity based on “whiteness” conferred a host of psychological, civic, and economic privileges that maximized the perceived differences between slave and wage labor.¹² In short, the emergence of American working-class identity was facilitated by and predicated upon a particular interpretation of racial hierarchy. For many immigrants, assimilation partially rested on adopting the racial prejudices of the majority group and claiming the privileges associated with whiteness. In this sense, racism infused the process of Americanization, and as the working class developed, it came “to think of itself and its interests as white.”¹³ Labor unions played a fundamental role in this process in the late 1800s and early 1900s. To quote Herbert Hill, “as successive generations of white immigrants effectively used labor unions to assimilate and become Americans, they acted through the same labor organizations to exclude non-whites from unionized occupations and from desirable jobs in many industries.”¹⁴

Throughout the latter half of the 1800s and into the 1900s, the industrialization of America fueled a dramatic expansion of the labor movement. From 1880 to 1915, the number of national labor unions in the United States more than quintupled.¹⁵ However, unionization relied on and therefore benefited a mostly white-ethnic constituency. Due to the mechanization and deskilling of production, unskilled immigrants and African Americans threatened the position of craft workers, whose security increasingly depended on effective organization and control over access to jobs. Unions became vehicles for the expression of racial and ethnic antagonism. In many instances, white workers “harassed and attacked African-Americans, Chinese, and recent European immigrants” while their unions lobbied to restrict immigration.¹⁶ Labor leaders, including members of the relatively egalitarian Knights of Labor, were prominent in the Chinese exclusion movement of the 1870s and 1880s.¹⁷ Native whites used the organizational resources of evolving unions to counter the growing threat of unskilled labor, to preserve racial and ethnic hierarchies, and in some cases, to mobilize against racial or ethnic minority groups.¹⁸

Once forged, white working-class identity limited the ability of many unions to respond to the changing circumstances of production and the shifting demographics of industrial communities. In short, the labor movement’s “whiteness” became a much more significant liability after 1916. Widespread deskilling meant that workers became increasingly interchangeable; regional patterns of migration meant that larger numbers of African Americans competed with whites for industrial jobs.¹⁹ Many labor organizations openly practiced discrimination in the nineteenth century, but union racism typically was not decisive for undermining the efficacy of strikes or organizing drives.²⁰ This study focuses on the historical moment when the labor movement’s “whiteness” emerged as a much more significant vulnerability that constrained strategic possibilities for achieving solidarity and winning strikes. I do not mean to suggest that union discrimination lacked concrete effects before the Great Migration. Rather, my argument is that the labor movement’s exclusion of black workers became a much more pronounced institutional weakness following World War I. As T. Arnold Hill of the National Urban League wrote in 1925:

It is inconceivable therefore that union officials would wish to ignore colored workers. In justice to their own interest, they cannot do so, and those recalcitrant nationals and internationals must see the folly of their position or force the entire Federation of Labor to pay the penalty for their short-sightedness.²¹

Strikebreaking, Solidarity, and Racial Violence

Social science research has often focused on the causes of racial conflict, and the split labor market perspective is particularly useful for understanding race relations in certain periods of U.S. history.²² However, much of the extant research has failed to directly address the issue of interracial solidarity.²³ This theoretical blind spot has obscured important instances of cooperation and has de-emphasized processes of coalition building. As a result, the conditions that enable workers to overcome racial divisions in the pursuit of working-class interests remain under-theorized. The existence of even localized or fleeting manifestations of interracial solidarity underscores the need to develop explanations for the full range of historical outcomes.

Most accounts of the 1919 steel strike mention that African Americans and whites were able to form interracial coalitions in the cities of Cleveland and Wheeling.²⁴ Why did solidarity elude workers in other communities? In Pittsburgh, Gary, Youngstown, and Chicago, widespread black strikebreaking helped to undercut the union’s position. Frequently, employers recruited black strikebreakers to exploit racial divisions and to fragment working-class alliances. African Americans crossed the picket lines despite union appeals and violent intimidation. Why were Cleveland and Wheeling different? Conversely, what explains the pronounced racial divisions in those cities and towns where black strikebreaking was prevalent? What differentiates these cases from communities where both whites and blacks crossed the picket lines and failed to support the drive? Why were cities like Pittsburgh, Chicago, and Gary, where African Americans openly defied white strikers, different from cities like Joliet, Milwaukee, and Reading, where there was no clear racial dimension to the pattern of strikebreaking? By examining labor market competition, union characteristics, and state responses to working-class militancy, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction: Labor, Race, and Class Conflict in 1919
• Chapter 2. Union Militancy and Workers’ Control
• Chapter 3. Northern Labor Markets and the Great Migration
• Chapter 4. The 1919 Steel Strike
• Chapter 5. Analyses of Strikebreaking, Solidarity, and Racial Violence
• Chapter 6. Interracial Solidarity in the New Deal Years
• Appendix
• References
• Index